Communications systems and devices are becoming increasingly diverse with new technological advancements. Communications devices are now able to support various different communications technologies and protocols. Various communications devices can operate in a communications system, e.g., network, and may communicate with each other, e.g., using direct peer to peer communications or using an infrastructure element, e.g., with communication between the devices being achieved with signals being communicated via a base station.
Generally in a wireless wide area network (WWAN) communications system, communications between two or more mobile devices is facilitated by one or more intermediate base stations, e.g., through uplink/downlink channels between mobile devices and the base stations. However at times, the loading conditions on one or more infrastructure elements, e.g., at a base station serving a plurality of communications devices, may become excessive decreasing communications quality.
In some scenarios it would be desirable to allow some traffic to avoid use of the network infrastructure thereby reducing the load on such elements. One way to do this is to allow devices seeking to communicate to use a direct link, e.g., a peer to peer communications link, to communicate. Such an approach can be particularly beneficial when two devices seeking to communicate are in each others vicinity and the quality of a direct peer to peer connection is reasonably good. Such an approach may serve to reduce the traffic load on base stations.
While allowing some devices to communicate using peer to peer signals can be advantageous under certain conditions, the peer to peer communications may create interference to existing peer to peer communications sessions and/or other interference. Accordingly, while peer to peer communications can be beneficial from a system perspective for communications between some devices and under some conditions, it might be undesirable under other circumstances.
In view of the above discussion it should be appreciated that there is a need for methods and/or apparatus for determining how, at a given time, two or more mobile communications devices should communicate, e.g., either using a direct peer to peer connection or via an infrastructure element such as a base station. While not required for all embodiments, it may be desirable if in at least some embodiments the decision of whether infrastructure or peer to peer communications should be used for a particular communications session took into consideration the interference that peer to peer communications might have on already ongoing peer to peer communications.